«The author of this hard-hitting book came from an old English naval family. He served in the Royal Navy for over thirty years, participating in most of the decisive actions of World War I and subsequently helping to direct the Royal Navy Staff College.

Captain Grenfell’s books on naval strategy — Sea Power (1941), The Bismarck Episode (1948), Nelson the Sailor (1949), and Main Fleet to Singapore (1951) — are known throughout the English-speaking world for their brilliance and their clarity. They were given top priority by reviewers here and abroad.

This final book — Captain Grenfell died suddenly of unknown causes in 1954 as he was drafting a sequel to it — is a 21-gun broadside on policy rather than strategy; it touches on so many raw nerves, conflicts with so many prejudices and vested interests, that publication has had to take place in our still largely free and uncensored United States. No English publisher will touch it as of the present — nor has any important American reviewer recognized its existence.

Those who are still fighting World War II will not like this book; but those who are tired of the same old black-and-white clichés with regard to Germany will welcome it as a breath of fresh air. Unconditional Hatred will find its readership, despite an almost complete blackout by the press. The present printing includes the final corrections and last-minute additions of Captain Grenfell. «

«If the evidence I have set out in the last six chapters is reasonably accurate, it follows that the many thousands of British men and women, including a number of my own friends and acquaintances, who still believe that Germany alone was responsible for the two world wars, which she started deliberately, wickedly, and without provocation or excuse, are gravely mistaken. It is not their fault. To reach anything like a balanced judgment on this subject requires much more historical reading than the ordinary person has time to devote to such a purpose.

We were, moreover, told repeatedly by our leaders during the war years that the Germans had done all this. Mr. Churchill, whose influence in shaping national opinion about the enemy was enormous, kept on saying that they had started both wars, in just those words. According to him, Germany was the one and only aggressor; the world pest. Mr. Churchill seemed to think that if Germany could be utterly

[91]

crushed, the rest of the world could resume its peaceful ways;

…

But the complete and absolute victory of the Anglo/American Allies, the necessary prelude to the intended extirpations, had hardly taken place when it crumbled into dust in their hands. The smashing of the German Reich and war machine did not remove «all our evils,» as Mr. Churchill had predicted. No sooner was the German military ‘menace’ out of the way than the ugly scowling form of a new danger was to be seen standing malevolently in its place. Hostile, militant Russian Communism had moved quickly into

[92]

the spot where Germany had been. Nor was it the only disturber of the Churchillian conception of a peace-loving world kept in a state of turbulence by the Germans. Very soon, militant Communism forced its way to power in China also.

Mr. Churchill’s theory that «the twin roots of all our evils» were Nazi tyranny and Prussian militarism was thus brutally disproved almost as soon as these latter were overthrown. Other tyrannies and other militarisms had come into view behind and beyond them. Other tyrannies just as bad, if not worse; other militarisms just as voracious, if not more so. Germany, after all, had been engaged only in recovering what had previously been German and Austrian territories when she was attacked by Britain and France. But after Germany’s collapse and occupation, Russia proceeded to extend her sway by a mixture of force and subversion to include countries to which she had no shadow of a claim: to Western Poland, to Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. German aggression (if aggression it was) was succeeded and surpassed by Russian aggression.

The declared aim of President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill to end aggression by destroying the German capacity for it was, in fact, one of the greatest failures in history. Never before, perhaps, have so many aggressions been crowded into so short a time as have taken place in the few years since Germany’s defeat: the Russian aggressions in Europe, the aggression by some person or persons unknown which drove the Dutch out of Indonesia, the Indian aggression against Hyderabad, the Chinese aggression against Tibet, the North Korean aggression against South Korea, the French aggression against Germany over the Saar, the Chinese aggression against the United Nations in Korea,

[93]

and probably several others I have overlooked.* A pretty good score for any similar period of years, and especially those immediately following the hanging of the German «butcher-bird’s» corpse on the wire.»[94]

«There was no realistic reason for placing any trust in Russia’s loyalty as an ally. She was fighting on the same side as Britain only because she had been driven into it by the German attack. In the twenty-two years between 1917 and 1939, she had set no new example to the capitalist world of international trustworthiness and straight dealing. Far from it. That Mr. Churchill, for a quarter of a century the foremost critic among British politicians of Communist Russia, could have been blind to the adverse possibilities of the Yalta proposals, and particularly the bisection of Germany to the Russian advantage, is hardly conceivable.

But if he was not, how did he come to accept

[112]

demands made by Stalin at Yalta which were so violently inconsistent with Britain’s declared reason for entering the war with Germany and which, if Mr. Churchill believed what he had preached from 1917 to 1941, were so obviously ominous with future menace to European stability?